Ask Him, He Is of Age

By Jason Masters FAICD PFIIA — LinkedIn

The building at 420 Kent Street was a church. Sandstone, built in 1868. The Catholic Archdiocese deconsecrated it around 1932, and for most of the years since it housed the Genesian Theatre. In July it became the Divine Playhouse, a queer theatre venue run by Heaps Gay with a $100,000 grant from Create NSW.

It opened on 8 July. Around seventy people gathered outside on opening night to pray the rosary in protest, organised by two Catholic men’s groups. Police attended the unauthorised assembly. The crowd dispersed by eight pm. A twenty-one-year-old man was given a move-on direction.

The protest closed nothing. The landlord did. KCSYD Pty Ltd, part of the Revelop property group, issued a breach notice the day after opening, then terminated the lease. The tenant says the landlord’s ground was offensive trade, a concept traced to an 1842 New South Wales law written for tanneries and boiling-down works. The venue closed eight days after it opened.

Christians objected to who was performing inside a building the church gave up ninety years ago. A property company finished the job.

I Want to Sit with John 9. Not the Part You Have Heard

Before I do, something needs saying about the chapter. John’s gospel carries the heaviest anti-Jewish polemic in the New Testament. Its habit of writing hoi Ioudaioi, the Jews, as a single hostile bloc has fed Christian antisemitism for centuries, and the expulsion scene in this chapter has been among the worst offenders. I write religious authorities throughout, because the people in the story are religious leaders acting institutionally, and because the alternative hands ammunition to readers who have used this text badly for a very long time. A chapter about exclusion deserves better than being pressed into service for more of it.

You know the opening. The disciples see a man born blind and ask whose sin caused it, his or his parents’. Jesus refuses the question. That refusal has done good work in queer theology and in disability theology for fifty years, and you have heard it preached. I am going to leave it there.

Read verses eighteen to twenty-three instead.

The healed man has been interrogated once already. The authorities do not accept that he was ever blind, so they summon his parents. Two people who know exactly what happened to their son. They have watched him beg. They know what his face looked like before and after.

They are asked three questions. Is this your son? Was he born blind? How does he now see?

They answer the first two. This is our son. He was born blind. Both true, both free.

Then they stop. How he now sees, or who opened his eyes, they claim not to know. The narrator gives their words directly: “Ask him; he is of age. He will speak for himself” (John 9:21, NRSVue).

You Know

John does not leave you guessing about why. He tells you plainly at verse twenty-two. They spoke this way out of fear of the religious authorities, who had already agreed to expel from the synagogue anyone confessing Jesus as the Messiah.

A note on the history, since it changes what the scene is. No evidence supports a formal policy of synagogue expulsion during Jesus’ lifetime. Most scholars read verse twenty-two as the evangelist writing his own community’s experience back into the story, decades later. J. Louis Martyn built the standard version of that argument in 1968. Adele Reinhartz has since challenged the mechanism he proposed, and the question remains open. Either way, the fear is real. What shifts is whose fear it is. Read as history, the parents are protecting themselves from a policy. Read as memory, a community records what its own people did when the cost arrived, putting it in the mouths of a mother and father. The second reading is harder to sit with and more likely to be true.

The parents are not villains. Read them again, and the pity is unavoidable. They are frightened people with something to lose, and what they stand to lose is their place in the only community they have. So they confirm what costs them nothing and hand the dangerous part to their son.

Ask Him. He is of Age

Some of you have heard that sentence in your own family. Not in those words. It sounds like we love you, but we are not going to discuss it at Christmas. It sounds like your grandmother would be devastated. It sounds like a relative who told you privately they think you are wonderful and then said nothing in the church car park while someone explained what people like you are doing to the country.

They know. That is the part worth sitting with. The parents in John 9 are not confused about the facts. They are not undecided. They know, and they calculate, and they decide their standing costs less to protect than their son costs to defend.

Notice where the pressure lands. Not on the man. He has already been excluded, so he has nothing further to lose, and he speaks with a freedom nobody else in the chapter has. The pressure lands on the people with a position. Institutions work the same way. A festival board. A vice-chancellor. A property company with a development pipeline and a reputation to consider. Nobody leans on the person telling the truth. They lean on whoever is standing nearby holding something worth losing.

The rest of the chapter is the man refusing to do what his parents did. They call him back and coach him. Give glory to God. We know this man is a sinner. He will not take it. His answer is one of the shortest and best sentences in the gospels. Whether the man is a sinner, he does not know. One thing he knows: “though I was blind, now I see” (John 9:25, NRSVue).

Theology or Testimony of Theology?

He does not argue theology. He has none to offer. He reports what happened to him and refuses to unsay it.

That is your instruction, and it is not the one the church usually gives you. You are told to learn the arguments. Master the six passages. Have the Greek ready. Some of you have done that work, and it has value. Understand what it did not do for this man. He wins by testimony, not exegesis, and he wins against people better trained than he is, because his experience sits outside their reach. They know a great deal. He knows one thing they cannot take from him.

They drive him out at verse thirty-four. The argument ends, and power takes over, which is what happens when a case has run out of answers. He is expelled from the religious space, and Jesus goes looking for him and finds him outside it.

He Was Never Named

He is never named. The chapter identifies him only by what was done to him.

On Saturday 25 July, several thousand people gathered in Hyde Park for a sing-in. Politicians spoke. Performers spoke. So did Jon Owen, Pastor and Chief Executive of the Wayside Chapel, who told the crowd Wayside sees them, loves them, and welcomes them always.

A Christian minister stood in a park and said the thing the parents would not say, in public, on the record, where saying it costs something.

The people locked out of a former church found the church waiting for them on the grass outside. That is where John 9 ends too. Not in the building. Outside it, with the man who told the truth and got thrown out for it, meeting the one who came to find him.

So here is the question the chapter leaves with you.

You know someone. Most of you know several. Someone put out of a congregation, a family, a job, a building. You know what happened, the same way the parents knew.

The question is not whether you believe them. You do. The question is whether you will say so where it costs you something. In the car park. At the church council. In front of the people whose regard you would rather keep.

The man in John 9 did not need someone who agreed with him privately. He needed someone who would speak while the room was still listening.

And when the door closes anyway, as it did on Kent Street, someone has to go outside and find him. That is the last thing anyone does in the chapter, and the gospel gives the job to God. Jon Owen did it in a park on a Saturday.

Will You Speak? And Will You Go?

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Scripture quotations marked NRSVue are from the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition, copyright 2021 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA. Used by permission. All rights reserved. Other renderings of John 9 are my summaries, with verse references so you can check them.

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References

ArtsHub. (2026, July). Divine Playhouse announces peaceful sing-in rally after being forced out of Sydney building for ‘offensive trade’. Retrieved 29 July 2026, from https://www.artshub.com.au/news/news/divine-playhouse-announces-peaceful-sing-in-rally-after-being-forced-out-of-sydney-building-for-offensive-trade-2867478/

Brown, R. E. (1966). The Gospel according to John (i-xii) (Anchor Bible, Vol. 29). Doubleday.

Cheng, P. S. (2011). Radical love: An introduction to queer theology. Seabury Books.

Levine, A.-J. (2006). The misunderstood Jew: The church and the scandal of the Jewish Jesus. HarperOne.

Martyn, J. L. (1968). History and theology in the Fourth Gospel. Harper & Row.

National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA. (2021). New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition.

QNews. (2026, July). 1000s spread queer joy at Divine Playhouse sing-in rally. Retrieved 29 July 2026, from https://qnews.com.au/1000s-spread-queer-joy-at-divine-playhouse-sing-in-rally/

Reinhartz, A. (2018). Cast out of the covenant: Jews and anti-Judaism in the Gospel of John. Lexington Books.

Star Observer. (2026, July). Christian groups will continue to protest new LGBTQIA+ venue Divine Playhouse. Retrieved 29 July 2026, from https://www.starobserver.com.au/news/national-news/divine-playhouse-protests/242678

Star Observer. (2026, July). Officially over: Divine Playhouse given 3 days to vacate after lease terminated. Retrieved 29 July 2026, from https://www.starobserver.com.au/news/offically-over-divine-playhouse-given-3-days-to-vacate-after-lease-terminated/242804